


Unfettered

by 221b_hound



Series: Unkissed [37]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Asexual Sherlock Holmes/John Watson, Couch Cuddles, Cuddling & Snuggling, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hands, M/M, Sherlock Holmes on the Asexuality Spectrum, Sherlock loves John's hands, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Touch-Starved, mostly the comfort now
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-21
Updated: 2015-03-21
Packaged: 2018-03-18 21:39:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3585027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/221b_hound/pseuds/221b_hound
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John finally has the splints and bandages removed from his now healed hands, and after three long and distressing weeks, he can properly touch his honeybee again. From the first caress, Sherlock comes apart, and all the feelings he's been repressing for three weeks so he could care for John come spilling out. All that grief and fear about what they did to John's beautiful hands. Also - there is a bun.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unfettered

John sat at Mrs Hudson's kitchen table and flexed the fingers of his left hand. His pinkie and middle fingers were both pale, the skin a bit wrinkled from so long in the splints. His wedding ring, which he had removed only until the swelling had gone down and he’d been able to put it back on again, was polished to a bright shine on either side where it had been buffed against the bandages for three weeks.

John’s doctor was very pleased with how cleanly his fingers had healed. John flexed his fingers again because he could and it felt so good to be able to _move_ them. He'd have to do some physio exercises to restore full flexibility, but he was no stranger to that. He still had an exercise routine for his shoulder, after all.

Next, John turned his right hand palm-up on the table. The skin on the heel of it was still a little pink and shiny and pulled very slightly when he stretched his hand. He had some cream to rub in to the skin to help the suppleness improve. Then he turned his hand palm-down to inspect the faint burn scar on the back of his wrist. The hair was growing back over the circular mark and it was barely visible.

It was good to finally be free of the bandages – to have his hands back as of yesterday afternoon. Even better was being almost free of the parade of nightmares that had gnawed like a rat at his nerve endings ever since the warehouse. Only the old childhood one about the bird had fluttered at the edge of his consciousness last night.

"There you are, dear." Mrs Hudson put the teapot in the table, placed a basket of scones down with it, “How are those poor hands of yours? They’re looking much better.”

John flexed them for her, turning them over. “Right as rain, Mrs Hudson. Good as new.”

“I’m so relieved,” she said, patting the hand that had been burned, “Those dreadful men. I was so pleased when I heard that awful Mr Milverton had died as well.”

Mrs Hudson refused to be quelled by John’s sardonic expression. “Don’t look at me like that, John Watson. If you and Sherlock weren’t practically having a celebratory waltz of your own, I don’t even _know_ you. Milverton was a nasty, nasty man and no-one is missing him in the slightest.”

John’s mouth hooked up in a grin on one side at the truth of it. He helped himself to a scone and lathered it with jam and cream, entirely too thrilled to once again be able to do such a simple task without assistance.

“It must have been so frightening, not being able to use your hands,” said Mrs Hudson sympathetically as she poured the tea. “I know Sherlock’s been worried about you.”

It had been frankly terrifying, but he didn’t see the point in dwelling on that now. “At least it got Sherlock doing the dishes from time to time.”

“He told you _he_ was doing the dishes?”

“I even caught him at it once.”

“I suppose he might have, the _once_.” She gave him a haughty look which made him laugh, and then she relented and giggled back.

“Thank you for doing the dishes, Mrs Hudson,” John said, “And most of the cooking.”

“Well, I know he did do a little of that for you, among other things. He really must be very happy you have your hands back. He’s missed…”

And suddenly she fell meaningfully, smirkingly silent and bit into a scone.

John frowned. “Missed what?”

Mrs Hudson fussed with a spillage on the edge of the jam pot first, before deciding that she should carry right on with her usual demeanour of shame-oblivious cheer.

“Oh, it’s nothing. Something he let slip when he was visiting one afternoon.” She grinned impishly as though sharing the unexpected adorability of a discomfited Sherlock. “He said he missed your hands, and then he went haring out the door saying he had to inspect a dismemberment.”

John sipped his tea and considered the comment, which didn’t mean quite what Mrs Hudson thought it did. Where she heard lascivious intent, John heard Sherlock saying to him, ‘I’ve missed you being able to bathe me’. Their usual, happy domestic routine of affection had been disrupted unpleasantly for three whole weeks that felt much longer.

In the last few days they’d shared showers again, and John had wrapped his arms around his honeybee, managed to use a few fingertips to trace the rivulets of water down Sherlock’s back and kissed Sherlock’s warm, wet skin - but it wasn’t the same.

Yesterday, after finally getting the all clear on the recovery of his hands, they’d been called straight out to a crime scene and returned home so late they’d fallen immediately into bed. Sherlock had risen again only a few hours later and dashed out to fetch a key book from someone’s private library – John had been too sleepy to register anything except that it was a research visit and nothing requiring backup.

Hence tea with their landlady as John waited for Sherlock to either call or come back home.

Mrs Hudson still had that indulgent smirk on her face and John valiantly ignored it, distracting her with questions about her hip and her new knitting circle, until he heard the front door open and close.

“That’s the Missus home,” Mrs Hudson pointed out with another impish grin, but then she sobered suddenly, and patted John’s hand gently. “He used to think other people’s pain wasn’t his business, you know, I think because he seemed to think nobody cared at all about his. But he has been so terribly upset about what they did to hurt you.”

“Well, I’d better go up then and remind him that all’s well.”

She wrapped the plate of scones in a clean tea towel and gave it to him as he was leaving. It was almost a novelty to be able to carry the plate upstairs without having to balance it delicately over splints and bruising.

Sherlock was busy shoving magazines aside on the coffee table so he could lay out three books side by side on it. He gave a little crow of triumph as John arrived, scooped the plate out of his hands, liberated a buttered scone and then, with an arm around John’s back, crowded them both back to the coffee table to look at the open books like they were a splayed corpse on an autopsy table.

“What do you see?” he asked, before demolishing the scone in three bites.

“A man seriously in need of book marks.”

“That is not helpful John.” Spoken around the last mouthful.

John peered at the books, then bent down to peer more closely at an illustrative plate that appeared in all three pages on display. “There’s a tree in that one that isn’t in the other two. Does that mean it’s the fake?”

“No. It means the _other_ two are fakes. Which means it’s the antique dealer, Melody Kingsdale, attempting to defraud the emeritus professor and not the other way around. And what’s more,” Sherlock flipped each of the books closed, did a kind of prancing skip before pirouetting back again, having produced snapshot of a macabre, linen-wrapped item from his pocket as though it were a rabbit issuing forth from a tiny hat, “The artefact in this photograph is not in fact a big toe from a mummified Egyptian nobleman, but the remains of Mr Purifoy, Ms Kingsdale’s long-lost business partner, who has been reduced to component parts, wrapped in antiquarian textiles and sold off in parts to unwary collectors. Ms Kingsdale is currently in custody and Sergeants Donovan and Anderson are doing the rounds of London’s collectors, attempting to reassemble the human jigsaw puzzle that is the Late Mr Purifoy.”

Sherlock grinned, triumphant and more than a little smug, as he flipped the photograph onto the top of the books, slipped off his jacket and flung it over the lot with twice as much flair, and even tossed his head a little, like a Spanish horse.

John couldn’t help beaming back at him. “And you did all of this just this morning?”

“Before 10.15am, which still left me half an hour to bring you coffee and a bun.” Sherlock waved an imperious hand at the kitchen table, where the offering had been left.

John, eyes crinkled in happy affection, stepped right up to him, wrapping one arm around Sherlock’s back to pull him close, and reached up with the other hand to catch Sherlock’s fingers in his. “You brought me a bun,” he said, his voice infused with delight and wonder, as though the _bun_ were the significant achievement.

Sherlock was naturally puzzled by this tone. “Yes. A bun.”

John kissed Sherlock’s fingers. “You identified a fraud, discovered a murder no-one but you even suspected had occurred, solved it, sent the Yard off to clean up the loose ends and you brought me coffee and a bun in time for elevenses.”

Sherlock blinked down at John, gazing raptly up at him, and the bemusement vanished, replaced by a smile that made his eyes shine. “Yes. You _like_ buns.”

“I do. And I love it when they’re brought to me by incredible, clever, amazing, beautiful consulting detectives. So you’re pretty much my favourite thing ever, just at the moment.”

“I’m always your favourite thing ever,” asserted Sherlock, monumentally pleased with himself.

“You are, my honeybee.” John released Sherlock’s hand and reached up to caress Sherlock’s cheek. He ran the tips of his fingers over cheekbone and jaw; brushed gently against the corner of Sherlock’s mouth with his thumb while the very tips of his fingers feathered against the lines at the edge of Sherlock’s eye, then over his brow. He pushed his fingers into Sherlock’s hairline and for a little while just combed his fingers through the dark waves, watching the way the hair curled around his fingers – watching his fingers caressing scalp and curls the way he had not been able to do in weeks.

Sherlock had stopped moving, his whole body stilled between John’s hand on his back and the other in his hair. He was gazing at John; at the way John watched his own fingers in Sherlock’s hair. Without meaning to, Sherlock gave a tiny little gasp and his body became suddenly and instantly pliable in John’s arms.

“I’ve missed this too,” John murmured. His hand on Sherlock’s back slid up, pressed to every bump of Sherlock’s spine through his shirt, until his fingers gently caressed the back of Sherlock’s neck. Then, with the slightest of pressures, he guided his unresisting sweetheart down for their mouths to meet.

John kept one hand in Sherlock’s hair, his fingers shifting in tiny little motions, revelling in the texture of fine, soft hair against his fingerprints. Their lips pressed together, warm and dry, until Sherlock’s lips parted just a little, as he sighed out a warm breath, and John’s soft kiss sealed the sigh between them and his tongue brushed lightly against Sherlock’s lower lip.

Still kissing, John trailed his fingertips down again, from hair to brow the cheek, and dwelled on the smoothness of the skin under the pads of his fingers, on the ridge of cheekbone. The hand at Sherlock’s neck played with tendrils of hair, stroked along the bumps of the vertebrae, his thumb smoothing over the swell of skull behind Sherlock’s ear, down over the tendon.

John’s fingers explored the beloved skin, the beautiful shape of bone and muscle, as though the braille of that body told him stories, straight from delicately roaming hands to his achingly full heart. Sherlock had not been the only one pining for this kind of touch. John had missed it too, so much: the intimacy of his hands – for so long only ever tools of medicine or war – used now for nothing but communicating his tender regard for this most remarkable of men, his darling boy. After so long bound up in bandages and pain, his unfettered hands were free to speak this unvoiced language of devotion, while their mouths traded _I love you_ without aid of vocalisation.

Sherlock’s own hands rested on John’s waist as, eyes closed, he simply let John caress his hair and face, and he kissed and kissed and kissed his John. His body seemed to have no other ability to move; to have melted into a state of bliss.

When John’s hands moved, however, cradling Sherlock’s jaw briefly before both hands slid so-slowly down, fingers drifting over the pulse on either side of Sherlock’s throat, Sherlock’s sigh became a little whimper, almost of distress. John pulled away, brow furrowed in concern, just as Sherlock lifted his hands to cover John’s.

He saw Sherlock’s pale eyes, opened wide, irises huge, expression holding a faint echo of recent grief, just before Sherlock lifted each of John’s hands in turn and kissed them. The heels of his thumbs, the knuckles, the palm, the wrists, each finger; each and every one, and the two that had been broken with the gentlest reverence.

“Sherlock…?” John began softly.

“Your beautiful hands,” Sherlock’s voice was barely audible, and it shook, “What they did to your beautiful hands. Your beautiful, beautiful hands…” And he resumed kissing them, sorrow and relief and veneration and tenderness in every press of his lips.

John pressed his forehead to Sherlock’s bent head and remembered, acutely, every time in the last three weeks that Sherlock had cradled John to his chest, had wrapped his large, warm hands carefully around John’s. How in the warehouse, after cutting him down from the frame, Sherlock had held John’s body and shielded John’s broken and burned hands with his own. After nightmares, while bathing, on the sofa, in bed. Sherlock had sat behind John and wrapped his arms around him and sheltered him. Taking such sweet and gentle care of him, and rarely showing how much this had distressed and hurt him too.

“Sweetheart,” John murmured, “Sweetling. My bumble. Shh. It’s all right.”

Sherlock didn’t reply, but holding John’s hands, he pressed the curled fingers up close against his eyes, and John could feel the moisture from them on his skin.

It might have been ridiculous, for Sherlock to be so overcome now, when at last John’s hands were healed again, but of course it wasn’t. Sherlock had been holding onto all that sorrow and fear so that he could aid John with his. Now that John was mended, Sherlock could let it go.

“Sshh, sweetpea, little bug, sshh,” John said, as softly as he would speak to a heartbroken child. He didn’t try to free his hands, but he backed towards the sofa, drawing Sherlock along with him. “Come on, precious boy, it’s all right.”

Sherlock winced and pushed John’s hands away from his eyes, struggling to regain mastery of his emotions, but he didn’t release John either. He didn’t hold too tight – John could easily have pulled free – but Sherlock couldn’t make himself let go.

“My honeybumble, it’s all right.” He leaned forward to kiss Sherlock’s once; twice. “Come on. Here we go.” Now he did free his hands, and wrapped his arms around Sherlock’s waist, and with their bodies close together, he sat. Sherlock, to avoid collapsing against John entirely, automatically splayed his knees as he moved forward, until he was straddled across John’s lap.

“That’s it, sweetpea. Beautiful boy.” John nuzzled Sherlock’s cheek and then kissed him one more time before sliding a hand up Sherlock’s back and into his hair again. He caressed skin and curls, while his other hand moved in small circles over the small of Sherlock’s back. He kissed Sherlock again, who kissed him back as though it was through their joined mouths that he found oxygen.

Finally, Sherlock relaxed again, melted weakly against John’s body as John, hand on Sherlock’s nape, guided Sherlock down to nestle his face against John’s throat. A few harsh breaths soon slowed and evened out. His eyes and nose pressed against John’s skin, his body flush against John’s, his arms wrapped close around John’s waist, he held tight.

John let his hands roam in firm, reassuring strokes. Down Sherlock’s shoulders and back, along his arms and thighs. Through his hair and against his chin and jaw and cheeks and lips. He kissed Sherlock’s hair and brow, softly, over and over

Sherlock’s whole body was pliant. John managed to pull him even closer and for a while combined a gentle rub-pat against the top of Sherlock’s rump with the flexing of his fingers threaded through the curls at the back of Sherlock’s head. He murmured endearments: _kitten_ and _firefly_ and _treasure_ ; _buzz_ and _cupcake_ and _little minnow_ ; and _bee, my little bee, my honeybee_.

And it was a mark of how far they’d come, that Sherlock surrendered to this comfort; to needing it and wanting it and getting it. What hurt John, hurt him, and these last weeks had hurt on so many levels. His John, his beloved, his most perfect bundle of fluff, reliving the physical fear (wounds willingly borne in defence of his love, which Sherlock would gladly have borne instead, in defence of _his_ ) in ongoing nightmares and waking disquiet. Sherlock had bent himself to doing everything in his power to bring comfort to his husband, and he had savagely repressed a selfish anxiety in order to do it.

Because, after so many years without kind and understanding touch, he had missed John’s hands on him like an piercing ache. Those strong, square hands, those sure and gentle fingers, that did not demand or push or insist, but only offered and held and gave. Hands that protected him and healed him and taught him that who he was, as he was, was enough.

So Sherlock snugged in close to John, as loose-jointed, as boneless-soft as a sleepy child, and breathed in the warmth of John’s skin as John’s beautiful hands soothed every lonely patch of his skin.

“Precious thing. Sweetpea?’

“Hmmm.” Sherlock was so peacefully cosy now he couldn’t find the energy to make words.

“I missed this too,” John repeated softly, “I missed touching you. I missed giving you this kind of love.”

Sherlock bumped his nose against John’s jaw and hummed.

“If you decided right now,” said John, “That this was all you wanted from now on, just this, that would be okay, you know. I could…” Here, Sherlock could feel John’s smile against his brow, “Go and have my affair with my penis upstairs or in the shower, and I wouldn’t bother you with it again, as long as we can have this. Holding you, touching you, being close to you like this. This is so good and I’ve missed this so much.”

Sherlock pushed his nose against John’s throat. “’S no bother,” he said after a moment, “I like your penis.”

John giggled.

“I do,” Sherlock insisted, his own smile brushing against John’s skin, “I enjoy touching your body. Your reactions are multiple and fascinating, and I like the way you look so content after you come.”

Still giggling, John kissed Sherlock’s brow. “I’m glad you like it.”

Despite evidence that it was not possible to get closer, Sherlock somehow managed to burrow closer into John’s arms. John squeezed him in a hug, then resumed patting the rise of Sherlock’s backside and caressing the nape of his neck.

After several lovely minutes, Sherlock noted, “The coffee’s cold by now.”

“That’s okay. I’ve still got my bun.”

Which made Sherlock snort with laughter, and that set John off, and the two of them clung together, giggling like little boys.

The coffee, when they got to it, was indeed cold. Zapping it in the microwave didn’t help the flavour at all. The bun – a buttery-sweet Chelsea bun – was perfect, though, and they shared it, hand-feeding morsels to each other, licking icing and crumbs from fingers and lips. The exercise ended with Sherlock squirming flat on his back on the carpet, giggling madly, not actually trying to escape from John who had sat on his legs and was blowing raspberries on his belly.

Downstairs, Mrs Hudson heard the thumping and the laughter and unnecessarily turned up her radio.

**Author's Note:**

> I have [quite a few Unkissed things over here](http://www.redbubble.com/people/narrelleharris/collections/362000-unkissed) now, if you're interested. Some other portfolios too, including some [ Guitar Man lyrics](http://www.redbubble.com/people/narrelleharris/collections/362342-music). Feel free to poke around :)


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